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Alexander Wales added an Unused Starfish Facts post, with some things that he didn't fit into the story itself.
Starfish
Alexander Wales added an Unused Starfish Facts post, with some things that he didn't fit into the story itself.
Great allegory. I alway begin and end my Econ Tools for EA class with this story. Touches me every time.
By Alexander Wales, crossposted with permission
Thousands of starfish had washed up on the beach, and a little girl was diligently throwing them back into the water, one at a time.
A man came up to the girl and said, "You'll never save all of them. What you're doing is pointless. It doesn't matter."
The girl threw another starfish into the water. "It mattered to that one."
The man snorted and walked away.
The girl kept throwing starfish, one after another.
To throw one starfish back into the ocean takes a trivial amount of effort, but to throw ten, or fifty, is much less so. The girl had not learned much of biomechanics, but she began to feel the strain in her back. Her skin had softened from the seawater, and the starfish themselves were abrasive. Her fingers had pruned. Her shoulder hurt. She was cut, twice, on her fingers, as the same storm that had stranded the starfish had also brought up broken shells and crab carapaces. The skin of a starfish was like sandpaper.
She tried switching hands, and could throw the starfish less well, and it wasn't long before she had mirrored all her injuries. She was bleeding, though the blood wept rather than flowing, briefly staining the starfish pink before they were tossed into the ocean.
It seemed as though there were just as many dying starfish as when she'd started.
After three hours, the girl was sunburnt. A passing man had told her that she should stop what she was doing, and had offered her some water, which she took, but he hadn't helped to throw the starfish back.
The girl's hands were cracked, scraped, and raw. Saltwater found the wounds, but she'd gone numb, and her motions became more mechanical.
"It mattered to that one," she thought to herself, "It mattered to that one," over and over, like a mantra. Her muscles ached, but the ache became familiar. When she'd started, her throws had been beautiful things, guided by purpose, but now they were sloppy and threatened to pull her off balance.
She did fall, more than once, landing on sand that was filled with jagged debris, and sometimes she was slow to get up. But she did get up, because there were more starfish to save, tens of thousands of them.
Night fell, and it was harder to see the starfish, but they were still in need of help. She was tired, and the cuts on her fingers had multiplied. The skin had been wet for too long, and in one place, on her palm, where she had gripped a thousand starfish to throw them, a piece of white skin had come off.
Still, she kept throwing starfish.
Her mother didn't find her until after midnight.
"Hi mom," said the girl. Her voice croaked. She had been saying, "It mattered to that one" under her breath for long enough that her vocal cords had strained. She threw another starfish into the ocean.
"You need to come home," her mother said.
"These starfish will die without me," said the girl.
"I know," said her mother. "But you need to come home, because if you keep doing this, you'll collapse on the beach, and like a starfish, you'll need to be rescued too."
The girl stooped down, back aching, and picked up another starfish. Many of them had died by this point, but there were still uncountably many that lived. The rough skin of the starfish grated at her tender skin, but she rose and threw it, arm protesting, and watched it fall down into the water.
Her mother grabbed her gently by the shoulders. "I'm bringing you home," she said. "It would be better if I didn't have to carry you, but I will if I have to."
"I don't want to be the sort of person who leaves starfish to die," said the girl, shrugging off her mother. But a part of her did want to be carried, because she'd walked for miles along this beach, one stooping step at a time.
"I know," said her mother. "But to survive, you have to be. Save as many as you can, but take breaks, get good sleep, eat well. Then go back and save more."
The girl swayed where she was. She was close to passing out, though maybe it was because her rhythm had been interrupted.
Her mother held out a hand, so they could walk together, like they'd done when she was smaller.
And it was then that she noticed the scars on her mother's hands, the calluses and rough spots, the places where cuts had healed. She had seen her mother's hands many times before, but had never asked why they were that way.
The girl slipped her hand into her mother's and began to cry as they walked back home.
Aaron - thanks for sharing a poetic and moving story.
There is a dark downside to this narrative.
Starfish are predators that eat mostly shellfish (mussels, clams, oysters) -- typically 3-5 times their body weight per day, meaning they're consuming 2-8 shellfish a day. They use suction-cupped feet to pull the shell apart until the shellfish tires out, and a tiny gap opens. Then the starfish extrude their 'cardiac stomach' out of their mouth, into the shell, and uses various enzymes (proteases, lipases, and amylases) to digest the shellfish's soft body, which can take a couple of hours. I imagine this is not a happy time for the shellfish, insofar as they might be sentient.
Starfish live 5-30 years, averaging maybe 10 years. So, during one lifetime -- assuming 10 year lifespan x 365 days/year x 5 shellfish/day -- one starfish may be eating about 18,000 shellfish. Each of which dies after a long, exhausting struggle to keep its shell closed, and then being gradually dissolved by enzymes over a couple of hours.
If shellfish are sentient, that's a significant amount of suffering each starfish may be imposing.
So, for each starfish a girl 'saves' (and assuming she's saving it about halfway through its life), we may be condemning about 9,000 shellfish to an prolonged, excruciating death.
Is the starfish-saving girl a hero, or a villain?
Does it depend on whether a starfish is 9,000 times more sentient than a shellfish?
I don't know. But. when analyzing how interventions affect total 'wild animal suffering', in complex ecosystems, we have to be careful about which victims we may be overlooking.
I feel like the original story, together with your comment, form a really beautiful encapsulation of what EA is.
Thanks, appreciate it!
I've always loved the back-and-forth give-and-take of EA discourse, and the quantification mindset.
And to add some obligatory nitpicking, "Individual starfish typically consume around 0.5 mussel per day although maximum feeding rates of 0.8 mussels per hour have been recorded for larger individuals"
I think this is a good question (and I see it's well intended), but it seems to me that you've overinflated your point. I don't think it's accurate say there is a dark downside - rather, there's just a reason for uncertainty.
Pointing out the number of shellfish (bivalves, to be specific) is potentially misleading if you don't also add some information about what reasons we have to think that they might or might not be sentient. I think these are the most important things to know:
The lack of a centralised nervous system seems pretty crucial to me. Given that, I don't think it makes sense to assume a very low degree of sentience. I don't think there's much reason to think that intensity of sensation scales this way at all (it seems more charitable to them to assume they have less diverse but still intense feelings). So I would treat it as "sentient or not" and put only a tiny probability on them being sentient, although not a 0 probability. That changes the framing from: "I think there might be a small amount of suffering here, and there's a LOT of them" to "there is probably no suffering, but I'm unsure, and if I'm wrong then it would be huge".
Hi Tristan -- fair points.
Indeed, my post was somewhat inspired by my wife Diana Fleischman's discussion back in 2013 of whether it's OK for ethical vegans to eat shellfish, given the uncertainty about whether their little ganglia carry any sentience; see link here.
My hunch as an evolutionary psychologist is that, given the extremely strong selection pressures on shellfish to resist being eaten by starfish, and their apparent use of all possible muscular effort and endurance to keep their shells closed when being attacked by starfish, if shellfish are sentient about anything, they're most likely to be sentient about resisting starfish attacks, and being motivated to treat them as a negative experience.
All good points!
Weirdly, I arrived at this comment just after rereading an internet horror comic that begins with a starfish eating someone alive. I hope shellfish aren't sentient.
TBH, I may have also been biased against starfish by the scene in 'Suicide Squad' (2021) of the superheroes fighting 'Starro the Conqueror', the giant alien kaiju starfish.
@Nematode Lover any thoughts?
I'd be surprised if preventing people from saving starfish from asphyxiating on the beach is the best way to help shellfish even if all the assumptions in this calculation hold. If not, Shrimp Welfare project should probably start the SPFSTSNABWWTSTONAF (stop people from saving these specific neglected animals becuase we want to save those other neglected animals fund).
Hi Geoffrey
I like your critical thinking and reflection about sentience. But, is it not about balancing an ecosystem instead of looking to tag them into victims or perpetrators? If starfishes generate suffering to shellfish as much as you calculated , is this a reason to leave thousands of starfishes to die in the beach? With the story, I feel invited to reflect on what event left the starfishes massively to die.
Furthermore, I can't avoid thinking on those animals and fishes who eat and survive on starfishes. What will they do when they suddenly don't find starfishes anymore, maybe they start eating shellfish or something unusual which could bring additional suffering. We don't know.
To me , the beautiful starfish-saver story is about ecosystems disruptions, and how much does human activity has to do with it. I would also challenge the man , who thought there is no difference saving one to one, and reflect on are we doing all what we can like the little girl? or is it easier to ignore because we think we can make no difference. Are we really identifying the problem to solve, and understanding the system?